Directed by Timothy Galfas (Black Fist) and written by Jack Laird from a story by Mary Linn Roby, “Die Now, Pay Later” never aired during the original run of Night Gallery. Instead, this and next week’s episode, “Room for One Less” were unaired stories from season 2 added to the syndication package along with episodes of The Sixth Sense. Rod Serling came back to record new introductions for these stories as well as those unconnected stories of the Gary Collins series.
Sheriff Ned Harlow (Slim Pickens) thinks that the death rate in Taunton, Massachusetts is increasing because of the January clearance sale of funeral director Walt Peckinpah (Will Geer). According to Harlow’s wife, Peckinpah has relatives in Salem and may be a relative of a warlock who was burned after the witch trials. But after getting all excited, Harlow’s wife calls the funeral home and yells at him.
The sale continues with the sheriff perhaps being a customer.
This is, as you can guess by Laird being involved, an episode of low quality. Why it’s a half hour is beyond me. Ah well — we should probably just enjoy the good stories and not be so sad about the rough ones.
Just seeing the name of the second story of this episode says to me Jack Laird and I already get a bit upset with it. Maybe I should give it a chance. I mean, there’s only a few episodes left. Actually, this was the last episode that ever aired on May 27, 1973. There are two more episodes that only played in syndication.
“Hatred Onto Death” was directed by Gerald Perry Finnerman (who mostly worked as a cinematographer and directed this tale and two other TV episodes, one of Moonlighting which he shot 58 episodes of and another of Salvage 1) and written by Halsted Welles (3:10 to Yuma) from a story by Milton Geiger.
Grant (Steve Forrest, Greg Savitt!) and Ruth Wilson (Dina Merrill) come upon a captured gorilla in Africa. Grant and the animal instantly hate each other and just the opposite, Ruth and the gorilla sense something in one another. He brings it back to America to study, despite his wife begging him to set it free.
As he studies the animal at his museum, a colleague named Dr. Ramirez (Fernando Lamas) tells him that he believes that at one point, Grant and the gorilla were enemies. Maybe in another life, they battled before. Ruth tells the gorilla a story of two of his kind battling over a woman. It goes wild and she releases it. This allows Grant to fight his enemy once more.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so down on the Jack Laird story because this story is really bad. Maybe he can save this episode.
This is how Night Gallery ended its network TV life. With a Jack Laird two-minute blackout sketch called “How to Cure the Common Vampire.”
Directed and written by Laird, it stars Richard Deacon as the Man with the Mallet and Johnny Brown as the Man with the Stake. It has no good joke and is as pointless as you thought it would be.
Look, I love Night Gallery. But perhaps with all the issues of season three, it was best that it died when it did. That’s so hard to admit.
But hey — two more episodes coming! Maybe those will be good.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Invasion of the Bee Girls aired on USA Up All Night on June 8 and September 1, 1990 and March 8 and September 21, 1991.
This was the first movie that Nicholas Meyer ever wrote. Yes, the same guy who wrote The Day After, Time After Time and the two good Star Trek films (two and four, if you’re playing at home) started right here. One day when he left to visit his parents, the script was altered and young Mr. Meyer wanted to take his name off of the project, but was convinced by his manager that he needed a credit.
Neil Agar (William Smith, Grave of the Vampire) is a special agent for the State Department sent to investigate the numerous deaths at government-sponsored Brandt Research.
It turns out that the scientists there are more obsessed with sex than their research to the point that some of them are literally getting balled to death. By the way, I’m on a quest to get the word balling and ball used in the vernacular again. Please help me.
The truth is the women of the research lab have all become Bee Girls through self-induced mutation. Now they have eyes that allow them to see like insects and the instincts of using and destroying men, several of whom totally welcome the end.
The main reason to watch this is Anitra Ford as Dr. Susan Harris. You may remember her from The Big Bird Cage and being a model on The Price Is Right. She’s in one of my favorite movies, 1972’s Messiah of Evil. If you haven’t seen that, you should probably just stop reading this right now and get on that.
Victoria Vetri plays the heroine, Julie Zorn. Using the name Angela Dorian, she was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1967 and 1968’s Playmate of the Year. When Apollo 12 went to the moon, a photo of her and Playmates Leslie Bianchini, Reagan Wilson and Cynthia Myers was there, inserted into the activity astronaut cuff checklists.
She also appears in Rosemary’s Baby and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 2010, nearly a quarter-century into her marriage to Bruce Rathgeb, Vetri was charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting her husband at close range after an argument. She received nine years in prison on a charge that was finally reduced to attempted voluntary manslaughter. Her husband claimed that she had been saying, “No more Charlie, no more Charlie,” as she’d been convinced that Charles Manson wanted her dead ever since her friend Sharon Tate was killed. In fact, the gun that she used was given to her by Roman Polanski, who her husband claimed that she often slept with along with Tate. Vetri is in a halfway house now and working on making her way back to society.
This movie is also known as Graveyard Tramps, which has nothing to do with what it’s really about. You should watch it anyway.
Here’s a drink recipe.
Invasion of the Bee’s Knees
2 oz. gin
.75 oz. lemon juice
.75 oz. honey syrup
1 oz. egg white
Dash of honey
Place all ingredients in a shaker, then shake vigorously.
Directed by Night Gallery regular Jeannot Szwarc and written by David Rayfiel from a story by Martin Waddell, “Whisper” has Sally Field and Dean Stockwell as Irene and Charlie Evans. He used to work as an architect, but his wife hasn’t been herself. Literally.
Irene and Charlie have moved to rural Mississippi because she channels the personalities of deceased people, a fact that he has just come to understand and deal with. After all, she always comes back and is herself again after being possessed. She’ll always come back to being Irene, he figures, he just loans her out. Right?
One of the spirits in her head is Rachel, a woman who keeps coming back and begins to obsess Irene. She starts referring to Charlie as Johnny and makes him dig up something — a dead child? — buried under some rocks. He goes back to his wife when he’s done but she tells him. “Oh, Charlie, I can’t get back. I can’t get back!”
Is Irene gone forever? Or is she just a victim of mental illness? There are no answers from this Night Gallery.
Three years later, Sally Field would gain more critical praise for another TV program about multiple personalities, Sybil. As for this episode, Szwarc proves why he’s the best director on the program and even has moments of Stockwell narrating directly to camera, as if this is all a dream or a memory.
The third season is rough but as always, when it works — like in “Whisper” — it gets it right.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Matthew Hale on Letterboxd, I’ve learned that there are alternate versions of this Mill Creek box set. For the sake of completeness and my obsessive compulsive disorder, here’s this missing movie.
Also known as La Tumba de la Isla Maldita (The Tomb of the Cursed Island); Young Hanna, Queen Of The Vampires; Crypt of the Living Dead and Vampire Woman, this Spanish film was originally directed by Julio Salvador with new footage added by Ray Denton (Deathmaster, Psycho Killer). TV western-bred scribe Lou Shaw, who wrote The Bat People, tweaked the Spanish dialog for the less-gory U.S.-version.
Andrew Prine (Simon King of the Witches) stars as Chris Bolton, a man who has traveled with his sister Mary (Patty Shepherd, The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman) to attempt to remove his father’s body from where he died. It turns out that there was a heavy sarcophagus that he found inside a hidden tomb but now his body lies smashed under it. The townspeople refused to help, as inside that coffin lies Hannah (Teresa Gimpera, Lucky the Intrepid) and they don’t want her ever coming back.
The 70’s were filled with female vampires of all shapes and sizes, from the Hammer lesbian-tinged vampires of The Vampire Lovers, the Satanic Twins of Evil, Jean Rollins’ sexually starved bloodsuckers, Daughters of Darkness, the fairy tale world of Lemora, Lina Romay as Jess Franco’s Female Vampire and the future vampires of Thirst. Every one of these films makes me happy despite the darkness and gloom of these days.
Ron (Robert Pratt) and Jake (Lou Antonio) sell fish on the pier during the day and at night, Ron visits Hyacinth (Lesly Anne Warren), a woman who refuses to see him when the sun is up. She also fears crossing running water, but as the barge she lives on is in a slowly draining canal, she promises to visit soon. Ron already has a girlfriend, Phyllis (Brooke Bundy), who goes into the barge and watches her competition go to sleep in a coffin. She barely escapes with her life. Jake, however, soon falls for her and both men are willing to give their lives to this gorgeous supernatural being.
“Death On a Barge” was directed by Leonard Nimoy and was one of his first directing jobs, as he had a one-year contract with Universal to act and direct whatever he could find. Working in the low budget of Night Gallery, he had to shoot a story that’s set at night — literally on the show Night Gallery — day-for-night. He also had to deal with the Universal tour constantly driving by and the drivers yelling while he was trying to film.
This episode was written by Halsted Welles and is based on the short story “The Cana;” by Everil Worrell. Worrell spent most of her life working for the U.S. Department of Treasury and wrote for pulps like Weird Tales.
I mean, if you made a movie just for me, this would be it.
This had to be sent to the Italian censorship board twice, as they said that the film “consists of a rambling series of sadistic sequences, meant to urge, through extreme cruelty mixed with degenerate eroticism, the lowest sexual instincts.”
Also called Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Trecento…(Rites, Black Magic and Secret Orgies in the Fourteenth Century…) and The Reincarnation of Isabel, this was written and directed by Renato Polselli, who also made Delirio Caldo, The Vampire and the Ballerina and Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion.
Hundreds of years ago, Isabella (Rita Calderoni, Nude for Satan) was tortured and burned for being a witch as her lover swore revenge. Then we meet Jack Nelson (Mickey Hargitay, making some wild movies as always) and his stepdaughter Laureen (also Calderoni) who are celebrating her engagement in a castle without knowing that the cellar is host to the black magic rites of the title. And if they get seven sets of eyes and the blood of virgins, they can bring back Isabella.
Any time this movie feels like it’s getting boring or starting to make sense, it cuts to either sex scenes or murder or Satanic rituals and you know, more movies could learn from what it was all about. I can only imagine the kind of parties that Polselli used to host.
There are also vampires, because this movie is also known as The Ghastly Orgies of Count Dracula.
You know, I never dated many girls who wore makeup before my wife. But there was one that was taking her time putting on makeup and she was putting on false eyelashes and I was trying to say that she didn’t need all that makeup and lashes and she said, “I’m doing it for me. And you. So let me get hot for you.” I wish I had seen this movie before I dated her, because man, the fake eyelashes in this are doing something to me.
Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion is a mondo film that draws from real newspaper headlines to show the sexual sick truth, as I’m certain an American trailer would say if this movie had ever emerged from its native Italy. Directed and written by Renato Polselli, it has a psychiatrist named Dr. Froodman explaining the deviancy that he has seen to a group of his students.
If this was shocking in 1973, when it first came out, it would be even more shocking in 1979. In fact, some of the adult scenes would still feel taboo in 2023, as two men touching one another, even with a female third present, doesn’t often appear in mainstream adult.
There are all manner of perversions here — and if you get what they are just by the name like me, well, you have some issues — including zooerastia, nymphomania, necrophilia, fetishes and gerontophilia. Even one of the students gets involved, as she explains why she fell for an older adult man while just a child; his abuse of her is just one reason why this happened. And the doctor is not above sharing the story of his servant who lost his virginity at the late age of 44 to someone of the third sex, as they say in these mondo films.
A lot of the inserts were either staged with a totally different cast or taken directly from American loops. You have to love the Italian exploitation industry, as they have no fear when it comes to being outright thieves. Polselli used his Ralph Brown name for this; the cast has a few notable people in it, including Isarco Ravaioli as the professor (he’s also in The Throne of Fire, Polselli’s Mania and Oscenità, Satanik, Danger: Diabolik and a few Sartana and Django Clones); Franca Gonella (Diabolicamente… Letizia and Luigi Rosso’s Beauty and the Beast); Bruna Beani (the priestess in The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, Byleth: The Demon of Incest) and Melissa Chimenti, who was Papaya in Joe D’Amato’s Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals. As most of those movies are filled with either sex, violence or sex and violence, you should know what you’re getting into here.
At once a movie that has a girl explain her sexual desire for dogs and then shag a stuffed animal while also being a film that closes with the line “We are all spent beings desperately trying to walk towards infinity,” this barrage of rapid cuts and filth is pretty much Polselli from here on out.
This movie is under seventy minutes and is packed with so many things that it feels like going to one of those conveyer belt sushi places and being overwhelmed by all the things you want to eat and then trying to remember all of the ingredients.
Lawrence Orlovsky (Allan Berendt) and his wife Regina Dracula (Hope Stansbury), along with their staff of Carrie (Patti Gaul) , Orlando (Michael Fischetti) and Carlotta (Pichulina Hempi) have moved into a mansion sight unseen, but these things are necessary as Regina has a blood condition that demands constant injections. Also: Lawrence is growing a monstrous plant in his lab.
There are also human monsters as well, like lawyer Carl Root (John Wallowitch), who is stealing the money from the Orlovsky estate. That’s when we learn that Lawrence is really Larry Talbot and yes, you’d have to watch some monster movies to realize he’s a wolfman. Then there’s Jimmy (David Bevans), back in town to romance his sister Carrie. I mean, he’s there for about five minutes before Regina kills him with a meat cleaver to the head and dissolves him in acid.
For some other reason, Lawrence and Root’s secretary Prudence Towers (Pamela Adams) have an affair that only can happen in a cemetery guarded by Petra (Eve Crosby), who decides to blackmail the family and is also destroyed by Regina. And then, as one imagines, werewolf and vampire must battle within the burning home as we crawl to the credits.
This is a movie that mentions time more than once. The leg-free Orlando says that “Time is a dictator. You must follow him or you’ll be left behind.” while Jimmy, in the middle of necking with his sister, is more optimistic, as he opines, “As one grows older, time becomes a pussycat.”
At one point, Regina tells her husband, “Oh, go to hell.” He replies, “We’re there already.” Even in a world of werewolves, vampires, legs being operated on with steak knives, plants that eat people and long bloodlines of monsters, the greatest monsters are marriage and family.
This played double features with Gerard Damiano’s Legacy Of Satan and man, I can’t even imagine what audiences were like after sitting through both of these movies.
Molly Wheatland (Geraldine Page) left her husband and found the bottle. But at least she has somewhere to live, a place that was cheap because everyone thinks that Jamie Dillman (John McMurtry) was shot by the police there when his criminal career ended. He’s been in the attic ever since, but Molly doesn’t care. She kind of likes having him around.
Directed by Edward M. Abroms (who directed tons of TV and also edited Street Fighter, Cherry 2000 and You’ll Like My Mother) and written by Rod Serling based on the story “Housebound” by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, “Something In the Woodwork” has Molly push and push Dilman to kill her ex-husband Charlie (Leif Erickson) until she goes too far and gets what she wants.
Geraldine Page was in three Night Gallery episodes (along with this one, she’s in two episodes in Season 2, “Stop Killing Me” and “The Sins of the Fathers”) and she really makes this one of the best stories of season 3. Abroms mostly worked as an editor — he edited the pilot — but he really shows some great work here, particularly some handheld shots that look quite good.
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